


summum malum

by xathira



Series: Beacember 2020 [2]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Angst, Beacember, Beacember 2020, Freeform, beast!Beatrice, curse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27949325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: For a moment, Beatrice relishes finally feeling powerful again.  How verysatisfyingit is for the Beast to be at the mercy of an insignificant bluebird…She does not stop.  Her wings kill the flame.  And everything she thought she understood about the Unknown comes undone.(For the Beacember 2020 prompt: Curse)
Series: Beacember 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2043295
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	summum malum

I.

The Dark Lantern falls to the forest floor. Its round glass window swings open. Beatrice, who alights on the fallen leaves directly across from the blinding flickering flame, feels no heat on her plumage. Instead, the lantern’s heart seems to drink the warmth from _her_ tiny body… it eeches her energy as if her very blood flows from where her clawed feet touch the soil into the earth itself, leaving her veins filled with ice. She could crawl inside the lantern’s belly and be burned alive. Every part of her, incinerated, all her hopes and mistakes reduced to less than ash. It calls to her, a brilliant void…

Behind her, the Woodsman grapples ferociously with the Beast—fueled by bitterness and heartache that bury all self preservation. Wirt is weeping, pulling at the ruthless branches that bracket his little brother’s unmoving body. The world is the sound of shattering wood, leaves torn from soil, fingernails scraping, animal snarling and raw bellows drudged up from the lowest part of the lungs, and Beatrice is too small to fight. She’s too small to do _anything._

Beatrice is sick of being small.

She beats her wings so furiously that she kicks up from the frost-silvered deadfall. The fan of her tail stirs up mulch. Rage powers her wingbeats, igniting a stronger heat in her rust-tinged breast, and she imagines that each vicious stroke of primaries through the winter air is the rocket of her human fists.

The vulnerable flame shivers bitterly in its cage. A subzero roar shreds the sudden choking darkness and rattles Beatrice’s hollow bones as if to break her into pieces. 

_“N̤͇̫̽̚O̝͐̍͛̃! Ś̔͑̾̚T̩̖̥͉̃O͎̊ͦ̉ͧP̻͋̇̃̉!”_

For a moment, Beatrice relishes finally feeling powerful again. How very _satisfying_ it is for the Beast to be at the mercy of an insignificant bluebird…

She does not stop. Her wings kill the flame. And everything she thought she understood about the Unknown comes undone. 

Utter darkness drowns the night. No moon, no stars, no glare of Beastly eyes or glow of Beastly flame. Silence, except for the snare-drum-rattle of Beatrice’s own pulse. She opens her beak as if to call out her boys, as if to scream, but the deafening noise of air being raked into her ribs cuts so close that she knows any vocalization will be lost to the fathomless deep. _I’ve killed the world,_ the bluebird thinks frantically. _Wirt, Greg… Mom, Dad…_

Her grief becomes the universe in which she is suspended: a singular point of agony in nothingness. Smaller than she’s ever been…

Until, all at once, the Unknown gasps alive.

Reality surges around her— _dives into her_ —and stretches her inside out, because she is the wrong shape and the wrong conglomeration of _everything_ for what the Unknown needs her desperately to be. Her avian skeleton is wrent and destroyed, obliterated the way lightning obliterates a sapling. Gone are feathers, skin, organs, blood—all useless, all worthless, compared to the masterpiece that the forest has planned—

Except—

The curse planted in her core does not want to move. It is part of the woods, in a way, a shard of the wild magic that lives in the seasons and the natural life-death cycle of animals. Inexorable. So although Beatrice shrieks for the Unknown to take it, to break the curse the way it is breaking her—endlessly, beautifully, pitilessly—the world cradles this hated part of her with wonder and care and decides to set this facet of her ruined soul like a prized gemstone in a priceless crown. 

_Her_ crown. 

Everything surges at her seams fit to burst. She is a supernova, a glorious rupture, storms and stones and the network of Edelwood roots sewn like veins beneath the skin of the earth. And just when Beatrice wholly believes that she will finally, _finally_ die… the boundaries of her body retract. Are solid. She collapses violently back inside her bones—no longer those of a fragile songbird, but something nearly _human_ —and opens her throat to shriek.

The spear of her voice finds the empty lantern lying dead in the mud. By her wordless command, it sparks and relights… a place to house the fragment of a soul that is too vast for one vessel alone. 

A panicked heartbeat draws her attention. Beatrice turns her face (it feels human, _must_ be human) in the direction of a sweating, sobbing, hopeless boy.

“B… Beatrice?” asks Wirt. His eyes water as they reflect the terrible new shimmer inside the Dark Lantern’s globe. How is it that he is flooded with light when she looks at him? The lantern is at her knees where Beatrice crouches in the fresh snow, right where it’d fallen from the Woodsman’s grasp. “Is that… is that you?”

Greg’s heartbeat in the ravenously growing Edelwood is subtle, but not defeated. Beatrice can sense the strain of his chest opening against his prison of bark as if her palms are cupped around his ribs. She answers Wirt with words taken from the icicles that glitter off the branches over her head.

“It is now.”

II. 

The Unknown whispers to her: _Beast._ A caress that starts behind her sternum and coils low into her being, a promise and a responsibility. The hands—not wings—that she lifts to inspect might pass as hers… but not the rest of her. Bile rises like sap to the back of her tongue. All of this, and Beatrice _still_ hasn’t earned her own body back.

Branches splinter from her temples to braid a wreath of thorns around her head. Her hair spills tangled and untamed down her back, threaded with sky-colored feathers and oaken leaves. Her throat is bare, but starting at her nape the mottled plumage woven into her locks becomes a pelt to preserve her modesty—azure vanes and stygian foliage that rustle when she goes to stand. Her bare feet are tipped in talons. Slender twigs sweep from her shoulders like skeletal wings or the shafts of arrows. A blink, and velvet night obscures her form. She is bird, wood, woman, monster. _Beast._

The Woodsman flees, descended to gibbering heartbroken madness. Beatrice watches him go dispassionately, balanced on the knife’s edge between raving and sobbing. Wirt is the one who needs her now. Wirt and Greg. The boys whose souls are

_(mine)_

don’t belong.

Her fingers pry the roots from Greg’s limp frame; the Edelwood folds away obediently at her touch, fawning, and Beatrice gags back disgust. Wirt waits until she’s stepped back to gather his brother into his arms; he quakes with shock and relief, and gasps sharply when Beatrice speaks again.

“You both need to go home. I know how to get you back… since I...”

“Wait,” Wirt interrupts. He embraces an unconscious Greg with one arm, and uses his free hand to rummage around in his pocket. What he reveals makes Beatrice breathless with rage and joy. “I mean t-to give these to you, before. I’m sorry. I was mad at you, and I… I didn’t think that—”

She snatches the crane-shaped scissors from his hand so harshly that her fingernails scratch lines of blood across his knuckles. Wirt draws backward with a whimper, shielding Greg with his body as best he can, while Beatrice tries to sort the strangling lump in her throat into a scathing curse or harpy’s screech. She settles on a hiccup that she can’t help anyway, black-marbled tears gathering on eyelashes that resemble the barbs at a feather’s base. The Beast bites her lower lip until she tastes copper. “You had them,” Beatrice chokes. “You stupid, petty bastard.”

“Beatrice—”

The back of her hand strikes his face so hard the crack of it echoes in the snowy wood. Wirt pants raggedly, head snapped to the opposite side. Beatrice wants to sink her teeth into the tender slope of flesh that joins his jaw to his collarbone and pull his jugular like a bird pulling a worm from the ground. She wants to peel his scalp from his skull. She wants to kiss him, for giving her the tool that is pointless to her now, but that will save the family she left behind. 

He yelps like a puppy when Beatrice seizes the collar of his cloak and hauls him to his feet. “Pick up your brother,” she orders him coldly. Ere the Beast can bludgeon him again, Wirt scrambles to lift Greg onto his back. “Good boy. Follow me, and don’t even think about running.”

“Where would I go?” Wirt moans, quiet and crushed. He avoids watching when Beatrice stoops to pick up the lantern 

(her lantern)

and seems to understand his place, terror taming his bewilderment. 

“Follow me,” Beatrice repeats. Her steps are sure, more graceful than the weightless hobbling hop of a bluebird or even the tread of her previous mortal limbs. It should frighten her, how naturally a predator’s gait suits this body. The Unknown wishes her to hunt, to kill, bury and consume. Snowflakes fall on her plumage-foliage and glisten like diamonds on the robes of a queen.

Wirt follows.

III. 

Greg gets to go home. His brother does not. Beatrice tries to push him through the preternatural barrier that only she can sense, but a mixture of Wirt’s festering guilt and her personal complicated fury-frustration-affection keep him tethered to her. They sit together for a long time after Greg is gone, letting frozen white mantle their shoulders as the moon watches overhead. The sun won’t rise until she wants it to. 

Eventually, Beatrice notes the bloodless violet of Wirt’s lips and the violent way he shudders. She considers hugging him… with Edelwood.

“Y-Your family,” he mutters unexpectedly. “You sh-should go find them. Clip their wings. Leave… leave m-me here.”

“You could still go back,” Beatrice says lightly, not looking at him. The lantern is in her lap; its flame is the vibrant blue that glances off a bluebird’s wing in flight, with a smoldering red center that paints the snow a murderous hue. “Are you really giving up?”

Wirt hunches into his knees with a broken sigh. He answers her with silent, wrenching tears, and his despair infuriates Beatrice so savagely that she has no choice but to grip his ear and haul him—squalling like an infant—in her wake. 

She finds her family at dawn, all huddled together in the hollow of an oak. Beatrice knew that they’d be here like she knows the knotted pattern of brambles over her brow. 

A thought, and vines grow over the hollow to cage her loved ones inside. She guesses that they won’t take her transformation well… and they don’t, losing their minds to abject avian horror upon witnessing the bright-eyed silhouette looming near their nest. Beatrice ignores their screaming and commands a stunned, mute Wirt to take her siblings out one by one and hold them still while she uses the scissors to cut their wings. He does as he’s told; it is as if he does not hear the begging, the crying, cannot feel the scrape of claws or jab of beaks, and when Beatrice is done his hands are pocked purple from bruises.

And Beatrice’s family…

Runs.

Each brother and sister chases the previous sibling, bolting as far and as fast as their regained legs can carry them. They don’t understand what’s been done to them, or why. They don’t recognize the hideous creature beneath her robes of shadow. Perhaps the blessing of their humanity will find them once they’re home… if there’s much of a home for them to return to. That isn’t Beatrice’s concern. 

Beatrice cuts her parents’ wings last. Her mother pauses, stumbling in the snow, tugged by Beatrice’s father to flee; her hesitation—the way she peers at Beatrice, repulsed yet fascinated—makes Wirt pipe up.

“Don’t you recognize her? Don’t you recognize your own—”

Beatrice’s claws in his arm cows him to silence. Without a second glance, Beatrice’s mother appears to make up her mind, and she and her husband trace the footprints of their children scattered through the snow. The Beast watches them leave with a sensation like bleeding in her chest. 

Wirt glances at her, appalled. “Why did you let them go? They’re your family, aren’t they? They searched for you all this time… they _missed_ you, and you’re not going with them?”

“I could say the same to you,” Beatrice snaps. Trees shake around her, moved by the heartache she won’t express aloud. How dare this boy question her? How dare he stare at her as if she hadn’t dethroned a king at her loweste point? Suddenly she thrusts her lantern at the idiot boy as if to hurt him; when Wirt reflexively brings his hands up to guard, Beatrice pushes the thing that houses her soul roughly into his palms until he takes it. “Neither of us fit in anywhere anymore. I don’t have a family, and neither do you. Got it?”

He hesitates, chin wobbling. Beatrice snarls and shoves him with enough strength to send him sprawling at her feet. 

The sight of him curled around the Dark Lantern and struggling to maintain his composure has rotten satisfaction blooming wide in her stomach. ( _Prey,_ the roots whisper.) “G… got it,” Wirt murmurs.

Beatrice arches over him like a hawk seeking to swoop on a wounded rabbit. He cannot see her smile past the opaque onyx that obscures her features, but it is a smile full of fangs. She smells his fear of her, _breathes_ it, and understands that for once _she_ is the one capable of inflicting real hurt. “We owe each other, Wirt,” she purrs in her new liquid voice—and delights at the apprehension carved into his face. “So do me a favor…”

IV. 

The old Beast sang. The new Beast _howls,_ a melody without lyrics, her voice soaring raw and lovely in the grimmest crypts of the woods. She keens the piercing shriek of hawks and the hysterical burble of warblers. She puts mockingbirds to shame, mimicking all the harmonies she catches and twisting them together like sculptures of metal and branch and glacial silver. Hers is a wilder reign, hungrier, and those that do not shake in their beds from nightmares about a blue flame and oil-slick feathers find themselves avoiding the wilderness and the awful beauty that haunts the air.

The new stories call her the Lady of the Wood. Twice-Cursed Girl. Bitter Goddess. Maiden-Beast. They say she will lead the lost back home for a price… but never trust her. If you see a bluebird’s feather on your path, take a different one. She is quick to anger. Her promises are lies. She’s a raptor that tore the last Beast to pieces—she’s the most dangerous monster in the Unknown.

And that boy? The one rumored to lead her victims by the enchanting light of a lantern? Never trust him, either.

V.

“Is this enough?” the timid Lantern-Bearer asks her. His hands shake when he guides the sapphire-black oil into the lantern’s reservoir. Beatrice’s luminous eyes roll back in their sockets at the relief the lantern grants her, its blissful heat soothing a wound cleaved into her heart that winter froze in place. “I can, I can give you more if…”

Sometimes Wirt’s nervousness grates on the Beast. She’ll kick him like a whining puppy until he falls silent, knowing that he’ll crawl simpering back for forgiveness; however, tonight she is sated and lazy, and the half-lidded look she casts on him is gentle as the moonlight that bathes her plume-swathed skin. “No… that’s good. You did a good job.”

The feral girl is the only one who praises him anymore, although her kindness is often swiftly paired with cruelty. Wirt knows she can’t help it. Beatrice holds all the wildness of predators inside of her, the infinite starvation of those who must kill to survive, and that edge has pared away any softness that she might’ve possessed. He’s grateful that she allows him to stay by her side. He likes to be needed. Acting as the Beast’s Lantern-Bearer affords him a prestige that Wirt had never dreamed of in his own life.

“Where should we go next, Madame Beast?” The obvious question, after Beatrice has spent a few days circling a particular town or village as an angel of death. The graves she leaves are spine-chilling amalgamations of her dueling natures: writhing trees with anguished faces sculpted into the bark, feathers arranged among the emerald-dark leaves. 

She doesn’t add everyone she kills to her forest. Occasionally, the Beast amuses herself trapping hapless fools in roots… she’ll break a few bones, drink a few screams… each victim is proof that she is not merely strong, but _omnipotent,_ nothing like the pathetic creature she’d been as the result of one stupid mistake.

(Beatrice found the bird that cursed her. It was inevitable, when she can see from every aspen, pine, oak, and birch, when the wind that combs the fields is the same air that she inhales when she sings. She found that damned bird, and when she did, she held it in one fist and tore out each damned feather. One. At. A. Time.)

A languid hum vibes all the way up from Beatrice’s happily curled toes. She arches her back in the grass—which has grown taller as she lies there, thick with wildflowers and weeds—and closes her hand around Wirt’s bony ankle. He sits next to her whenever he can (whenever she lets him) and his breath hitches at her contact.

“Where do _you_ want to go, Poet-Soul?” Beatrice asks, in a generous mood. Had her predecessor ever been this full? Had his flame ever blazed so magnificently? If she—who came from nothing, was no one, had not a single thing to be proud of in her miserable life—had become a _queen,_ what had that lowly worm begun as? “Befallan? Port Cinero? Where haven’t we haunted?”

Wirt considers, blushing that she had thought to include him in her plans. He plays with the handle of the Dark Lantern like a kid messing with his shoelaces. “M… Maybe Cedar Cliff, in the east…”

Beatrice’s hand on his ankle tightens. She warns him with her fresh, sharp talons at his achilles tendon. “Why Cedar Cliff? Hoping to see your floozy there?”

Wirt backpedals, facing her with open consternation. “Wh—no! There isn’t—I don’t have a—you’re the only one I—”

He passes the test. Beatrice releases him, and the insidious brambles trying to climb over Wirt’s shoes recede. Her starry gaze roams the ocean of midnight that blankets her forest. “You’ll always stay with me, won’t you Wirt?”

“Of course,” comes his instant, fervent response.

“Do you ever miss home?”

“N… No…”

“Liar,” the Beast hisses. The centers of her eyes glare orange.

“I don’t,” Wirt protests. He shifts to his knees beside her, imploring. “I wasn’t… anyone there. No one will miss me. My family has Greg…” His tone is acrid, the corners of his mouth twisting. “We’re a team, right? I take care of you, and you take care of me?”

She traps souls in wood and ivy. He chops them into tinder with the axe slung over his back, a weapon that’s made his scrawniness all lean muscle and sturdy angles. Beatrice allows him (charges him) to carry her greatest weakness, and in return, she has made him into a legend in his own right. 

“You never did fit in there, did you?” she muses, running her talons up his boyish jawline. “But here…”

“Here is different,” Wirt agrees. “Because you need me. Right?”

Beatrice grins under her veil of shadow: cracked glass and burning embers. “Right,” she assures her loyal Lantern-Bearer. “I do need you. Forever…”

And ever.

And ever.

**Author's Note:**

> Done for [Beacember 2020!](https://beatriceoftheday.tumblr.com/post/636680694147530752) I came up with all the prompts except the first (and best) one, and the wonderful Tanicus (author of Earth Angel - go read it) created some RAD graphics and posted the holy week on Tumblr for all to partake.


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